Using evolutionary design to interactively sketch car silhouettes and stimulate designer's creativity
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing creativity in car design for designers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing IGA methods with specific adaptations.
The paper tackled the problem of interactively sketching car silhouettes to stimulate designer creativity by proposing an Interactive Genetic Algorithm (IGA) that uses Fourier decomposition and a crossover mechanism, and found that while 'friendly' attributes led to diverse interpretations, 'sportive' ones resulted in conventional representations, potentially limiting shape renewal.
An Interactive Genetic Algorithm is proposed to progressively sketch the desired side-view of a car profile. It adopts a Fourier decomposition of a 2D profile as the genotype, and proposes a cross-over mechanism. In addition, a formula function of two genes' discrepancies is fitted to the perceived dissimilarity between two car profiles. This similarity index is intensively used, throughout a series of user tests, to highlight the added value of the IGA compared to a systematic car shape exploration, to prove its ability to create superior satisfactory designs and to stimulate designer's creativity. These tests have involved six designers with a design goal defined by a semantic attribute. The results reveal that if "friendly" is diversely interpreted in terms of car shapes, "sportive" denotes a very conventional representation which may be a limitation for shape renewal.